Mitch doesn’t call Tuesday night, which leaves me far more disappointed than I have any right to be. I try to shrug it off philosophically, and go to bed early to make up for the night before.

Wednesday brings good news: Web Development has finished the template for the Grow site, and it’s really lovely—well, lovely except for the part where it still says Grow on it, but I’ll work on that. Our color palette works especially well onscreen, and everyone in the department is walking around with big, self-satisfied smiles on their faces. I don’t feel one bit bad about telling Ben that this is a direct result of my excellent overseeing.

For all I know, maybe it is. And if it’s really just the vagaries of fate, why shouldn’t someone get credit? Fate, after all, can’t possibly get a raise out of this, while it’s entirely conceivable that I might.

Add to that the fact that I arrived this morning to find a really snazzy-looking Grow mouse pad on my desk—that one was Melody’s baby, her first solo project, and she hit it out of the park. It’s all the right colors but she didn’t put the name on it.

She knows me so well.

So I feel pretty damn good, despite my pile of message slips that never seems to get any smaller.

Ryan buzzes me. “Your lunch is here.”

“My what?” Am I losing my mind? Did I order lunch and forget about it? Why can’t I seem to keep any thought in my head these last couple of weeks?

“Your lunch. It’s here.”

I didn’t order lunch. I’m sure of it. “It’s a mistake, Ryan. Send it away.”

“I don’t think I can do that. You’d better come handle it yourself.”

Well, that’s odd. “Why can’t you—Is this code? Are you being held at gunpoint or something?”

“Nope,” he says, sounding decidedly cheerful for someone who might be in a hostage situation. “It’s just something you need to handle.”

When I venture out to investigate, he’s putting his Out to Lunch sign on his desk. “See you in an hour,” he says.

“What? Where are you going?” He always tells me in the morning when he’s planning to go out at lunchtime. I mean, he doesn’t have to, but he does. “And where’s this delivery boy?”

Ryan looks pointedly over my shoulder, and I turn to follow his gaze.

Mitch is standing next to the door I just came through, resplendent once again in jeans and cowboy boots. No snaps today; he’s wearing a long-sleeved green t-shirt that stretches over his broad chest in an alarmingly delicious way. He’s also holding an enormous picnic basket.

“I guess I’m your delivery boy,” he says, and when he says it in that unbelievable voice of his it sounds absolutely filthy.

I go a little weak in the knees. “Oh.”

“See you in an hour,” Ryan says again, and I hear the door shut behind him.

Mitch smiles, eye-crinkles and dimples out in full force. “Are you hungry?”

“Starving,” I say.

I'm always telling him I'm starving, and that's not very ladylike. It's a good thing I'm not trying to impress him.

I show him into my office, and when he pulls a red-and-white checked blanket out of the picnic basket, I just laugh and move the guest chairs around to the other side of the desk.

He puts the basket on the now red-and-white checked floor and starts unpacking Saran-wrapped bundles of food: huge sandwiches, a platter of fresh veggies and dip, wedges of apple pie. And cream soda, which is a very interesting choice. In my experience, cream soda is one of those things that people either love or hate, and it’s kind of risky to assume someone will like it and just show up with some.

As it happens, I love cream soda.

“Everything looks so good,” I say, my mouth watering. We sit cross-legged on the blanket—thank God I’m in slacks—with the picnic basket between us. “How did you know this was exactly what I needed?”

“Anyone who’s being overworked needs a lunch delivery, even when they don’t know they need it.” He hands me a sandwich and takes the other for himself. “I felt bad for not calling last night—my mom called and talked my ear off, and by the time she was done, if I called you, we were gonna be on the phone till midnight again—so I figured since I didn’t have to tape today, I’d surprise you.”

I don’t respond for a moment while I savor the first bite of my sandwich—shaved ham, Genoa salami, provolone cheese. Exquisite. “It’s a wonderful surprise,” I tell him, and I mean it. Not just the food, of course, but that he would be so thoughtful. He really is a nice guy, and I’m glad he wants to be my friend. “I didn’t know when I might be able to get away from this office again, and I really wanted to see you.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, I—” I put down my sandwich. “Look, I don’t want us to have to have a heavy conversation about this every time we get together, but I do want to tell you—to your face—that I owe you an apology for the other night.”

“Okay,” he says. And then he waits.

Apparently when I said “apology,” he thought I meant an actual apology. I was hoping he would figure it’s the thought that counts. Instead, it looks like I really am going to have to deliver the goods.

“I suppose … I suppose I was giving you mixed signals.”

“You could say that.”

“But it wasn’t out of any malice or whatever. I just … you know, you’re very good-looking—”

“I’ve been told,” he says, with admirable restraint.

I just bet. “And I’m certainly not trying to say—”

“Is there an apology in here somewhere? Because so far all you’re doing is making me want to shake you. Or kiss you again.” Thankfully he says this with a big grin, so I don’t need to faint. “You can’t make a habit of kissing Mr. Wrong, you know.”

“Don’t call yourself that,” I say, and lean across the picnic basket to swat his arm. “I’m just trying to say I hope you understand my reasons for acting the way I did.”

“I don’t,” he says calmly. “But that’s irrelevant. You feel how you feel. I really like talking to you and spending time with you, and I am a big boy; if this is how you want us to be, I’m fine with that.” He takes a bite of his sandwich. “Good friends are harder to come by than girlfriends, anyway. Being turned down isn’t going to kill me.”

This is an interesting concept, since being turned down—even by someone I didn’t like all that much—would crush me. “Of course. There are plenty of other fish in the sea,” I say brightly.

“I don’t date fish,” he deadpans.

“Neither do I.”

“No,” he says, pointing at me with his sandwich. “You date jerky veterinarians.”

“Point taken,” I say, and even though I’m not even half done with my sandwich, I start on my pie. “My God, where did you buy this?”

“I know a little place,” he says.

I have a feeling that no matter what neighborhood he was in, even though he’s lived here for less than two months, he’d know a little place. He’s that kind of guy.

“I might have to go online to let your legions of fans know that your true talents lie in being able to ferret out the most delicious food in any city.”

“I don’t have legions of fans.”

“Well, you must have some, right?” I take another huge bite of pie. “Kari knew who you were right away.”

“That’s because Kari is a little….” He seems to be searching for the right word.

“Obsessed?” I offer.

“I was going to say enthusiastic.”

“Same thing.”

“Oh, no, it’s not.” He raises his eyebrows at me. “You don’t know from obsessed, trust me.”

“Do tell.”

I’ve heard Kari’s side of this stuff many times, but in all honestly I’ve always wondered about the other side. How do these guys feel about being the objects of so much attention?

“Oh, it’s unbelievable. Has Kari told you about Fan Club Weekend?”

“Some of it, yeah.”

“It’s crazy.” He moves the picnic basket to the side and leans back on his elbows, stretching his long legs out beside me and crossing them at the ankles.

We may be just friends, but that doesn’t stop me from appreciating the view. God, he sure can fill out a pair of jeans. And that t-shirt is thin enough that I can see the muscle definition underneath—and just, wow. Chest, arms, abs—the guy’s got it all.

“There’s this huge room, right? And tables all along the walls. You get assigned a table, and you sit and you smile and you autograph things until your hand is going to fall off. Which is fine when people are genuinely happy to meet you and they’re asking you interesting questions or telling you what stories they like you in—or even if they’re shy and just get their autograph or picture and leave right away.

“But then there’s always a group of them that think they know you—they hear rumors on the internet about this person who won’t work with that person, or that person nixed this other person’s storyline or whatever—and they give you hell for that. Or they tell you how awful you are, or how you shouldn’t have taken advantage of that poor woman, or—” He breaks off. “Well, they say that to me. Obviously, there are some people whose characters aren’t quite as … fluid in their morality.”

“So, you’re a bad guy.” Funny, I never thought to ask Kari what kind of role he played.

“On Doctors & Nurses I was, yeah. Except that’s the thing—I’m an actor. I don’t have any interest in playing a bad guy. That might have been all anyone was seeing, but what I was playing was a flawed but well-intentioned person who loved deeply but had a hard time keeping his anger in check, and tended to act rashly. Where’s the fun in playing someone one-dimensional?”

I shrug. “Aren’t soap opera characters kind of one-dimensional by nature?”

“They don’t have to be. With the right kind of writers, you can get fantastic material.” He sighs. “MC has great writers right now. That really helped with my decision to make the move east.”

“The other night, it sure sounded like you had another reason,” I say.

He nods a little. “Listen, you really can’t repeat this,” he says.

“Deal.”

“Let’s just say the number one star of the show wasn’t a lot of fun to work with. And with the kind of fan base he has, and given that he was a lifer—”

“A lifer?”

“Yeah. Someone that isn’t going to make any kind of career outside of soaps for himself. There’s nothing wrong with that if that’s what you want to do, but my point is this guy is a lifer, so he wasn’t going anywhere. The storyline … changed, and unless I wanted to spend the next few years being a cardboard villain, I had to go.”

“But why?”

“Our characters were kind of facing off over a girl,” he says slowly. “Played by an actress named Vickie Walsh. She’s an absolutely fantastic actress, totally professional. Unlike some people.”

“And?”

“And as far as the who’s gonna get the girl question, I was winning.”

“Oh.”

“Fan mail was really high for us. It was kind of threatening, so he went to the head writer. In the end the show wasn’t willing to risk rocking the boat, not on the off chance that Vickie and I could pull it off.” He shrugs. “I think we could have. She didn’t want to work with him anymore, and she was really selling our pairing. We were building a pretty big fan base of our own, which was nice. The fans called us Recon.”

“Recon?”

“Yeah, the characters were named Rebecca and Connor. That’s what internet fans do when they love a couple. They smash their names together into something cool. Or, if they don’t like them, into something awful.” He grins. “Pity the poor Jason and Liz fans.”

I think about it for a moment, then giggle. “I wonder what the Blake and Cassie fans will call you?”

He smiles and shakes his head. “They’re calling us Cake.”

“How can they be calling you anything? You haven’t even gotten together yet.”

“We’ve been onscreen together, and sometimes that’s all it takes,” he says. “So, with Recon, the fans were loving us, which was ruffling someone’s feathers.”

“And?” I say again.

“And the writers kind of stacked the deck—had me do some pretty underhanded things in the interest of getting the girl—and she ended up riding off into the sunset with our hero.” He takes a bite of his pie. “Vickie was disgusted, though you can’t tell onscreen how miserable she is. Like I said, she’s a total pro.”

“And you?”

“I decided not to renew my contract, and Connor went to jail.”

“Ouch.”

“It’s okay. The network didn’t want to lose me, so they wrote this new part at MC, and that was that. I like the challenge of playing someone completely new, and it’s not like I couldn’t go back someday. At least they didn’t kill Connor off.” He takes a long drink of his cream soda and shrugs again.

It occurs to me that he must have been pretty popular if they wrote a whole new character specifically for him. But what do I know about soaps? I’ll have to ask Kari if that’s as impressive as I think it is.

Kari.

Oh, shit.

This is exactly the kind of thing Kari wants to hear about.

If I tell her, it’ll be all over the internet in four seconds. And Mitch will know where it came from, and he’ll be disappointed that I didn’t keep my word. That matters to me. He’s smart and funny and genuinely interesting, and he trusted me enough to tell me this. I can’t stab him in the back like that.

I don’t think Kari’s going to be very happy with me.

“So, here I am, back on the east coast,” he says, dragging me out of my horrified reverie. “I’m not looking forward to snow, I can tell you that. I’m closer to my family, so that’s also a plus, but it was hard to leave. I’d been in LA for a long time.”

I hadn’t really thought about him being homesick. Now that I think about it, I wasn’t really thinking about him at all, except to think that he’s not my type—which is becoming harder and harder to say, because he kind of turns me on anyway. That’s really self-centered—seeing him only as someone who has an impact on my life in one way or another, and forgetting to take into account that he’s a person in his own right—and I kind of wish I never figured it out. Because now I feel like the biggest jerk ever.

“Am I boring you?” he says, sounding slightly testy.

I’ve been so busy castigating myself for being self-absorbed that I failed to notice he wasn’t speaking anymore. Oh, sweet irony!

“No,” I say firmly. “I’m so sorry. I was lost in thought, but it wasn’t because I didn’t want to listen to you.” I want to have his full attention—this is important—so I set aside the remains of my pie and focus on him. “Listen. I might come across as really selfish sometimes, and maybe sometimes I am. But mostly I’m just flaky, and I don’t mean to be insensitive. You are easily the nicest guy—the nicest person—that I’ve met in a while, and I’ve really loved the conversations we’ve had, and I’d like to know even more about you. So I’m sorry if I seem like I’m totally flaking out and don’t care what you’re saying. That is most decidedly not the case.”

He looks at me for a long time; so long and so inscrutably that I’m a little afraid he might grab me and start kissing me again.

He smells so good—looks so good—that the idea doesn’t sound at all unappealing right now, and I push it away. That tangent is going to get me daydreaming again, and I don’t want to look away from him until he knows I mean it. “Tell me more about your job. Sleeping with your stepsister, scandalous!”

“You really want to know?” he says.

“Yes,” I say, stretching out on my stomach next to him and propping my chin in my hands. “Tell me everything.”

And he does.